Service quality as perceived by customers is an important aspect of the telecommunications industry. To successfully maintain and enhance the service quality to customers, network behaviors require measurement and analysis. However, measuring and improving a customer's quality of service experience remains a challenging task, which requires accounting for technical issues, such as response times and throughput, and non-technical issues, such as customer expectations, prices and customer support. One mechanism to measure these issues is by root cause analysis for network troubleshooting in a communication network. For example, a customer service assurance platform may be used to analyze performance and quality degradation from a variety of network services, such as content servers and user devices, to ensure customer service quality is consistent with communication service provider expectations.
Another mechanism to troubleshoot communication networks involves use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Quality Indicators (KQIs). KQIs and KPIs are typically measured in an effort to determine various performance levels of the network services such that an operator may detect any deterioration (degradation) of service levels as well as to identify the cause(s) associated with the deterioration in service level. For example, a user's device may experience poor coverage or fail to handover due to a faulty base station or a content server may suffer from a hardware issue resulting in performance degradation. However, such detection and analysis does not consistently define a correlation between network anomalies and customer perception. For example, network KPIs may suffer from the effects of a small number of degraded samples, such as a small number of network devices or servers, being analyzed for which the samples are used during various KPI calculations. As a result, network performance levels may be identified as problematic when in fact the issues are merely related to a relatively small number of degraded samples which are not reflective of the network.